WYSK: There funded by dark money PACS, but some good reporting has brought out these names: David Koch, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Mark Cuban, Harlan Crow, and Michael Bloomberg. Some of there members are most famous for stopping big bills. Joe Leiberman, for example, single handedly stopped the single payer portion of the ACA. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsen Simena kept the John Lewis voting rights act from passing, and famously kept the senate from repealing the filibuster.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call themselves a “leftist”, but maybe I move in the wrong circles. (I am a vegan though.)
About half of my close friends are leftists so it’s definitely a circles thing.
I am both a leftist and 89% vegan.
It’s a distinction I’ve seen increasingly in the past year or so. On riddit there are a couple communities (stupidpol, for instance) of people who consider themselves leftists and not US-style liberals… specifically, stupidpol members believe in marxist/socialist economics and societal structure but reject American liberal identity politics. People will correct you if you refer to them as liberals vs leftists.